Just curious about your thoughts on this.
Personally, I've never played Arena and have only an extremely limited experience with Daggerfall. I guess I'm most interested in this question with regard to the 3 most recent titles - Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim - because I've played those pretty thoroughly.
Is Skyrim the biggest departure of all, thanks to loss of attributes and classes and permanent character-creation decisions (apart from race)? Or is Oblivion the biggest departure in its shift from character-skill-based resolution of actions such as combat, lockpicking and speech to a player-skill-based resolution?
I suppose with the most recent game, there's always a temptation to see it as the outlier, or the herald for the future, or the point at which it all changed. Is that the case with Skyrim? Or is Skyrim more of a continuation of the process we've seen throughout the series - a process of streamlining/reduction of skills, attributes, effects, etc?
What do I mean by 'greatest shift' or 'biggest departure'? I guess I'm talking about the experience of gameplay. E.g. for me, while I wish Attributes hadn't been removed for TESV, I don't think I really notice their loss. On the other hand, the combat in MW vs the combat in OB is strikingly different. But anyway, I'm happy to be proven wrong.